Frozen Music (6 page)

Billy was tall and dark, but not very handsome, although his profile wasn't bad and anyway, as my friend Arabella said, ‘It doesn't matter, because when you really love someone they'll look beautiful to you whatever.' On the surface that sounded encouraging, but actually it was just as baffling. Why, I asked myself, if I loved Billy, did I think him plain to the point of ugliness? Was it a) that I didn't actually love him, or b) I loved him but suffered from unusually clear eyesight? These were the kinds of things I thought about when I thought about love. Then this had happened. How? Of course I knew how. You kiss and you press yourself against each other and your breathing gets laboured and a funny ants' nest kind of feeling develops in your general pelvic area, but how
did it actually happen
? And this was the time I chose to feel like a child, now, when it was too late and the door to childhood had slammed shut behind me, never again to be open.

I felt sick. No, not morning sickness already. I shot the cigarette in my hand – as much a symbol of my decline as a gin bottle to a ruined mother – a look of pure loathing and got up to extinguish it under the tap. I chucked the butt into the flowered sprigged cotton laundry bag
hanging on a hook by the door, the one reserved for my father's shirts, before trundling off to bed. I was too miserable even to cry any more.

I tossed and turned in the night gloom of my bedroom. I had broken every rule of decency and I was still barely fifteen. I had even broken the law! And what if I was pregnant? With wide-open eyes I stared at the window, and I imagined sitting on the window-sill and just tipping over, ever so gently. I craned my neck. Was that my broken body I saw out there on the street? My organs ruptured, bodily fluids seeping out on the paving stones. I held on to the sides of the bed, willing myself not to move. To die right now would be a release; then again, to die and only ever to have been a child, that was worse.

I began to wear black, only black. I felt it suited my character. Still, it didn't stop some people from making fatuous comments like ‘Oh how lovely to be young, all that unspoilt innocence' (Edith Brookenberry, friend of Granny Billings). Or ‘Make the most of these bright childhood days, they pass so quickly' (sentimental old fool visiting school, whose name I can't remember). But at least I wasn't pregnant and my parents never did find out what had happened.

‘Life carries on as normal,' I whispered to my reflection every morning, but it was cleverer than me and took no nonsense. ‘Now isn't that a pretty lie I see before me,' it whispered back in an Irish accent for some reason. It knew that nothing would be the same. I had trusted my body and now my mind had descended into chaos. Somewhere halfway down I had spotted Audrey drifting along like an autumn leaf on a breeze. (She was too insubstantial to plummet.)

The more I doubted myself, the louder the ding of chaos sounded in my head, the more I craved order around me. I drew up endless lists for every aspect of my life: schedules, What-to-Read lists, What-to-Achieve lists, What-to-Pack-and-Wash-and-Fold-Away lists. Lists of Likes and lists of Dislikes. And the more lists I made the more I seemed to need to make until every aspect of my life was written down somewhere on some piece of paper. I sought out rules and reasons as other teenagers searched for drugs and cigarettes. And I got increasingly interested in what made people fall.

‘How did you come to this?' I asked the old drunk who spent his
days slumped by the entrance to Kensington underground station. A filthy hand appeared from under the grey blanket, scrabbling round the pavement for an imaginary coin. ‘Thank you, little lady, and bless you.'

Impatiently I squatted down in front of him. ‘I didn't give you anything, I'm sorry. I just asked you a question.'

‘Well, if it's all the same to you,' he sounded peeved, ‘I'd rather have a few pennies for something to eat.'

‘You know you'd only spend it on drink.'

The old tramp peered at me through bloodshot eyes that might once have been a good shade of blue. ‘And what makes you such a know-all, little missy?'

I had to think about that and my legs were beginning to ache from squatting. Passers-by were giving me odd looks, wondering, no doubt, what I was doing down there on the pavement. ‘Experience,' I answered finally.

‘And does experience teach you to leave an old man to starve?'

I had to stand up, my thighs were killing me. I thought about all the times I had heard Madox and Audrey talk about heartless Tories and selfish acquaintances cocooned in their comfortable middle-class existence, and I made a decision. ‘I haven't got much money on me, but if you come with me I'll give you something to eat at home.'

I walked down Kensington High Street, the old tramp shuffling along by my side. I wished people wouldn't stare so. Once a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit of the kind that looks like a chalk-lined blackboard stopped and asked me if the man was troubling me. ‘He's troubling my conscience,' I replied. ‘But thank you for asking.'

It seemed to take for ever to reach the house, the old tramp lurching and muttering at my side, but at last we were there and unlocking the front door I stood back to let my guest inside. Just then Janet appeared, coming downstairs with the vacuum cleaner in her hand.

‘What on earth!' She put the Hoover down on the parquet floor, careful even in a time of stress not to mark the delicate veneer. ‘Out with you, dirty old thing. Harassing a young girl like this; shame on you.' As she spoke, Janet came towards us, shooing the old man out as if he were a stray mongrel and I her pet pooch.

‘Janet, this gentleman is my guest and we don't treat guests like that in this house, do we?'

Janet paused and looked hard at me for a moment. ‘Oh, yes we do, young lady, if they're drunken old tramps. Shoo!'

‘My parents will not be pleased…'

‘They certainly will not,' Janet snapped. In the doorway the old man was grumbling to himself.

‘They will not be pleased to hear how you treated this gentleman.' I lowered my voice and it became eager and pleading. ‘Come on, Janet. This is humiliating. I asked him to come with me. I said he'd get a hot meal. And you know how Mum and Dad are always going on about the selfish society and how we should be looking after the weakest and those less fortunate than ourselves.'

‘And you, young lady, know very well that that's all talk and has nothing to do with real life. Real life being that your mother would have a fit if she found one of those less fortunate than herself putting their big dirty footprints all over her cream stair carpet and sitting on her pretty chairs. Now you.' She glared at the tramp. ‘Out before I call the police.'

‘I don't believe you did that,' I said after she had slammed the door behind him. I followed her down to the kitchen. ‘That poor old thing could have been me or you.'

‘Speak for yourself,' Janet said, putting the kettle on.

‘I seem to have spawned a future chairman of the WI,' Audrey said. ‘And she's always so disapproving. I'll turn round and find her looking at me with those great big blue eyes brimful of reproach. It's very wearisome.' My mother was in the drawing-room, complaining about me to her friend. Olivia was over for her spring visit. ‘And it was definitely a mistake teaching her German. She uses it to hiss at me in shops. I tell you, everything sounds even more censorious in that language. She's changed her mind about becoming a psychiatrist too, which is a real nuisance. There I was, telling poor Caroline whose son's gone completely demented, LSD apparently, that at least she wouldn't have to worry about the future as I was sure Esther would
look after him free of charge. He'll need care for the rest of his life, they think, and Julian and Caroline are not well off. And now what do I tell them? And now it's the law. Why? I ask her. She says she likes rules.' Audrey gave a little laugh. ‘I suppose she can always sentence him to something. I tell you, I sometimes wonder if she is my daughter.'

I leant against the doorpost, reflecting on my mother's uncanny ability to place herself at the centre of any situation. No wonder she was permanently exhausted. Even my career choice was seen as a calculated attempt to show her up.

‘I tell you, in an earlier age she would have been one of these religious zealots, ever ready with a hair shirt and a burning stake.'

‘Linus is completely set on architecture, but he seems to be going out of his way to do it as differently as possible from his father,' Olivia said. ‘Bertil went to Chalmers, Linus wants to go to school in Copenhagen. He's refusing even to contemplate joining the family firm. I tell you, I love the boy, but he does drive me absolutely demented sometimes. When he doesn't like something he just withdraws, spending hours doing those cartoons of his – “My Life as It Ought to Be”, he calls them. Or he just wanders off, for whole days sometimes. “Just looking,” he says. “At what?” I say. “Stuff,” he says.'

I stepped into the room. My mother looked faintly startled to see me, then again she often did, as if she needed a moment or two to place me. ‘Have you got a photo of him. Of Linus?' I asked Olivia.

‘Not with me, no. I never seem to carry photos. Don't you remember, years ago you did a drawing for me, of Bertil and Linus, because you felt sorry for me not having a photo.' Olivia smiled expansively at me. Not for the first time, I felt something had gone slightly wrong; surely Olivia was meant to have been my mother. By the sound of it, Audrey could easily have been the cause of Linus, the strange boy dreaming away at his desk or drifting through the streets of his home town.

‘He's off to the States once he's done his military service,' Olivia said. ‘Just for a few months doing work experience at a firm of architects there. I suppose it will do him good to get away. And then on to Copenhagen.'

‘Audrey is trying to make me go to France for the summer,' I said. ‘She says it will do
me
good. Sometimes I think that's just a parental euphemism for something that does them good.'

‘Don't be precocious, dear.' My mother sighed. ‘It's very unbecoming.'

It was my turn to sigh. ‘I think it's called growing up.' I left, taking refuge in my room, although I didn't like it very much any more. Audrey had had it redone as a surprise while I was staying with Arabella Felix and her family in Cornwall over Easter. It had been bad enough finding that Posy McKenzie had been invited to the Felixes' without having to come home to a bedroom that had turned into some yucky
House & Garden
teenager's dream, co-ordinated to within an inch of its life. Audrey was working part-time at her friend Trish's interior decorating business and anything that stood still for more than five minutes was in mortal danger of ending up swagged, or dragged, or at the very least with a tasteful bow.

‘It's so… green,' I mumbled. ‘And new.'

‘It's not new, darling. Your bedside table is Victorian, early Victorian as it happens, and the dressing-table is Art Nouveau. I thought I had taught you these things.'

‘I didn't mean new like that. And it's lovely,' I lied. ‘Really. I love it. It's just new to me, that's all. My history is gone.' I pointed at the corner by the window. ‘There was a marmalade stain there, just for example, from my Paddington Bear stage. And that old rug, I used to sit on it and pretend it flew.' Then I saw how disappointed Audrey looked. ‘But this is much nicer,' I said. ‘Thank you so very much.' Audrey, whose happiness depended on her uncanny ability to believe only what she wished to believe, had gone away convinced that I was thrilled with the transformation. She still was.

I threw myself down on the bed with its green-and-blue patchwork quilt and picked up the library book from the bedside table. I was reading according to my reading list, alphabetically according to author. Right now I was on G, G for Goethe.

Linus could feel it. Lotten was expecting him to
do
something. It was obvious from the way she leant back against the sofa cushions, her hands clasped behind her neck, her breasts jutting; from the way she was looking at him through half-closed eyes. He tried to buy time, getting up and changing the record, taking off the Stones and putting on his old Bob Dylan album. Lotten jiggled about on the sofa, sighing loudly, a frown across her clear high forehead. Taking a deep breath, Linus sat back down and slipped his arm round her shoulders.

‘What's wrong?' Lotten asked.

‘Nothing's wrong. Everything is great.'

‘Something's wrong?'

‘No, no, nothing is wrong. Really.'

‘There's no need to get cross.'

‘I'm not cross.'

‘Well, you sound cross to me.' Lotten shrugged off his arm and sat up straight.

Closing his eyes, Linus gave her a gentle shove against the cushions, lowering himself down on top of her. In his mind he had always remained a fat boy and he was terrified of hurting her, of crushing her under his weight. Supporting himself on his knees and one elbow he fumbled with the small buttons of her shirt until she pushed him off, undoing them herself with a haste born more from impatience with his clumsiness than passion. Once all the buttons were undone she pulled him back on top of her – she was stronger than she looked – and her hand reached down to his belly and to the buckle of his belt. He kissed her with increasing desperation as he felt her hand undo first the belt, then his trousers. His penis, that instrument of spite, remained resolutely limp and useless, but it sprang up, hard and insistent when he least of all wanted it, like the other day when he was dancing with Beatrice Nilsson.

‘Get up, you bastard,' he mumbled between clenched teeth. ‘Move!'

‘What was that?' Lotten's voice was thick.

‘Nothing, nothing.'

‘Can't you get an erection?'

Linus rolled off her, throwing himself back against the sofa with a groan. Lotten's voice grew warm with concern. ‘It's OK, you know. It happens to most guys at some stage. It's really nothing to worry about.'